A ten-year-old girl went to the dentist to have a filling replaced. Since a nerve was exposed in her tooth, the dentist put in a temporary filling. In those days, dentistry wasn’t very evolved, and the filling wasn’t very good. Over the weekend when the dentist’s office was closed, the girl’s temporary filling fell out.

The exposed nerve caused the girl such great pain that she just lay in bed and cried and cried. Her mother couldn’t do anything to calm her down. Read More

A few years ago I was assigned a patient with tongue cancer who wanted to leave our nursing station. She didn’t get along with the caregiver and that person didn’t get along with her. Recently her arm was broken during nursing by the caregiver. Following which she refused any further contact with this caregiver. I only had to take care of this woman for the last four weeks before she left our nursing station.

I was not excited about doing this work. This patient was feared by my colleagues because of her aggressive behavior. So quite reluctantly I started to visit this woman in her home. My work included helping her with basic personal hygiene, preparing breakfast and taking care of various tasks in her home. The old woman received me very sullenly. I found out that she was an ethnic German immigrant to Germany from the former Soviet Union. Read More